Ithaca College Tops Oregon, Auburn in EPA’s Game-Day Test

Auburn University and the University
of Oregon squared off in the national football championship game
in January, then lost to tiny Ithaca College in a game-day
contest for top recycler.

With the 2011 football season starting this week, the
Environmental Protection Agency is bringing back for a third
year its “Game Day Challenge” aimed at getting schools to
reduce trash and boost recycling by fans at the games.

Last year Ithaca, with about 7,000 students, generated less
than one-tenth of a pound of trash per fan at its home games in
central New York, besting 74 other colleges in the contest.
Auburn, which had 25,000 students on its Alabama campus,
generated more than 20 times as much trash per fan. Auburn beat
Oregon 22-19 to become national champion.

At Auburn, more than 85,000 people fill Jordan-Hare
Stadium, with thousands more flooding the campus for home game
celebrations. Combined, the fans generate 80 tons of trash, said
Donny Addison, the school’s manager of waste reduction and
recycling.

“It’s like the Hoover Dam spilling over,” Addison said
today in a phone interview, referring to the barrier that
creates Lake Mead in Nevada. “You let it happen and deal with
the cleanup the next day.”

In a bid to manage the challenge, students hand out
recycling bags, Auburn posts 200 recycling bins and Addison
recruits fraternity students the next morning to sort through
the 2 tons of recycling collected.

‘Expand It’

“We created something, but now we’re thinking about how to
expand it,” he said.

At Ithaca, a Division III school, games at Butterfield
Stadium average 2,100 fans. Students in a class on Principles
and Practices of Sustainability wear fluorescent green T-shirts
and hand out color-coded trash and recycling bags to cut down on
waste, according to an article in the Ithacan, the school’s
newspaper.

Overall, 2.8 million fans at the participating schools
diverted more than 500,000 pounds of waste last year, according
to a statement by the EPA. That’s equal to saving more than
105,000 gallons of gasoline being used in vehicles.